As it turned out, there was no piano of the conventional sort, instead a rather flashy Yamaha keyboard, possibly a 'Yamaha PSR-S Series Keyboard', possibly costing getting on for £2,000 and probably not usually there at all. The church appears to have an 'Organist and Choir Director' rather than a 'Director of Music' and he told us all about it, with one of its attractive features being its portability, to the extent of musical events in the nearby 'Cricketers'. On this occasion, I imagine it was wired into the wider church sound system. He also told us that, at home, he played a Grotrian-Stenweg, noticed for the first time at reference 1, only a few days ago. I think he said a grand, an instrument which had a completely different touch and sound from an upright.
Audio-visual assistance included having the words of hymns and carols displayed on a large screen fixed to the rood screen, an ornate, wrought iron screen which I remember as being controversial at the time we came to Epsom, around a quarter of a century ago. The large screen (and the two repeaters in the aisles) were visually intrusive, but for me, without varifocals, very convenient, being able to read said words with my long range spectacles. The only catch being that my once-a-year singing voice, a long time ago quite respectable, was very rusty. With the audio-visual assistance relaying the voices of the choir to the back of the church, covering up the fact that only a few of the rest of us were singing audibly - and making us few feel rather less conspicuous.
We also seemed to have coloured lights drifting around the walls and ceiling at the west end, just behind where we were sitting, after the fashion of a discotheque, not very holy and rather distracting. I wonder this morning whether the Catholics, with their taste for the dramatically visual, go in for such. I also wonder, not for the first time, about how much we are missing with the vanishing, for most of us, of collective acts of worship. Of at least one time in the week when our minds are jointly lifted above our daily, our mundane concerns. Acts which are replaced, as I recall, in 'Brave New World', by recreational drug fuelled, ritual orgies. A benign version of a Black Mass?
The church part of the service had the twin focus of the immaculate conception and of angels, with the question of the age of angels being explicitly brought up. We were also treated to a sort of angelic inner monologue, imagined by someone or other. It struck me as rather odd to focus on two of the very aspects of Christian faith which doubters - not to say non-believers like myself - find hardest to swallow. Maybe they know what they are doing.
While the musical part of the service involved rather more guitar twanging, with rather a strong beat, than I am used to or care for. And at one point I thought I was hearing a harp, but perhaps that was the Yamaha.
Readings in demotic English, rather than the variety used by the good people of King's College Chapel, the one in Cambridge that is, not the one in the Aldwych, this last being first noticed at reference 2, nearly ten years ago now. Coincidentally, also the occasion when we first came across the RAF church, noticed again, just a few days ago, at reference 3. As some statistician recently observed, the world is full of such coincidences, rare though any one of them might be, individually.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/piano-40.html.
Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=lentells.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/posh-end-of-neck.html.
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